The little boy who refuses to eat, because he can’t stand the clumsiness of his maimed paws. Ah, God. Unbearable pity.
‘How d’you decide how long to make the missing fingers?’
‘These are my real hands.’
‘What?’
‘The masks are copies of my bones the way they would have grown. It’s not hard to work out. Now ask me why I don’t wear fake normal hands.’
‘You can’t fake anything. Remind me not to try and turn you into a diplomat.’
‘Hahaha. I can lie. I do it all the time.’
‘You can talk bullshit; there’s a subtle difference. I wish I’d known you before.’
‘You did. You didn’t like me much.’
‘I mean long ago. My life has had its ups and downs, but tonight it strikes me forcibly that you have been horribly unhappy, for years at a time. I never put it together before. I wish I’d been there, to stop things from hurting you.’
‘I deserved most of it,’ said Sage. ‘Not the meningitis, obviously, but the rest. If you’d known me when I was a teenage junkie you would not have liked me, Ax. But I know what you mean. Me, I have a desperate need to time travel and punch out the playground racists—that you’ve never told me about, but I know the fucking South-West of this fucking country.’
Ax was from Taunton, Sage was Cornish. ‘I’d have liked you,’ said Ax, ‘if I’d known you. We should have been together; total waste of time that we weren’t.’
‘Never leave me, Ax.’
‘I won’t.’
They laughed, dropped the handclasp and looked away from each other, smiling. ‘The racism didn’t bother me,’ said Ax. ‘Much. I was okay with it by the time I was ten. I resign myself to work around stuff like that.You write horrors like the Arbeit Macht Frei immersions, as you told me once, because you want to see the world as hideous, miserable and terrible as it really is, and still find it loveable—’
‘Did I say that? I must have been pissed.’
‘Pissed enough to trust me, briefly, on that anomalous night out. Then you were straight back to giving me unmitigated shit, any chance you got. But you’d changed, next time our paths really crossed, in Dissolution Summer. Still winding me up the whole time, and habitually plastered, but not finding the world such a difficult place to love. If you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘Yeah, well, that was Fiorinda. I’d met Fiorinda, year before all of this shit started. In March, in Amsterdam… She turned everything around.’
When the three of them joined Paul Javert’s Countercultural Think Tank (not even Ax having any idea what the doomed Home Secretary was planning), Fiorinda had been sixteen. Sage’d been playing the big brother, waiting for her to grow up, and it’d been Ax who’d made the crucial move. It had only gradually dawned on him, through the terrifying cascade of disaster that followed, that he’d cut Sage out… That Aoxomoxoa the sex-machine, the laddish fool you’d think couldn’t deceive a fly, was secretly, passionately, permanently in love.
The problem was on the agenda, the unspoken agenda of the drug they’d taken, and both of them knew it: but the words wouldn’t come. They faced each other in silence, the skull’s frontal bones glimmering with a faint silver light. The look moved into a kiss, hard to say who initiated that, and then, irresistibly, into plenty more than a single kiss. Ax wanted it all, then he wanted out, and caught an alarming glimpse of what it might be like if he ever really had to fight this supple giant. They flung apart from each other, breathing hard—
‘Don’t ever do that to me’, snarled Ax.
‘Do what?’ demanded Sage, on his back with an arm flung across his face. ‘Who? Did what to whom? You absolutely sure that wasn’t your idea?’
Ax chucked pebbles at the sea. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘sorry. Two sides to it.’
He heaved a sigh, moved over and shifted his friend’s arm. The mask looked up, doing a heartrending line in alone, conflicted and confused. ‘Hey, stop that. Not the whipped puppy dog. Knock it off, you’re scaring me.’
‘How do I know what’s the right face to make? Me, oversized blundering oaf.’
Ax lay down, settling his head on Sage’s shoulder. ‘If you are so lost in the complex world of grown-up human emotions, maestro, who made the mask?’
‘Doesn’t mean anything. A lot of that emotional mapping is join the dots, mechanical. Wood ants could build an avatar mask.’
‘Wood ants. Tuh.’
The sea swooshed in and out. They stayed like that for a while, very happy.
Ax sat up and fetched out his smokes tin.
The Brighton Pier was dark. The cocktail party on the restored West Pier, the gig they were meant to attend, was in full swing, all that lacy, artfully restored old ironwork lit like the Titanic on ghost-crab legs; like a beached starship. Tinsel-faint wafts of music escaped from the sound-proofing. ‘Now listen,’ said Ax, lighting the spliff and handing it, ‘we’re going to Allie’s party, and I put it to you that we walk in there tonight, the two coolest dudes in the known universe.’
‘I thought you didn’t like being famous.’
‘Usually I don’t. But this isn’t celebrity culture, this is undeniable fact. Far as our island nation goes, right now, we fucking are the two coolest dudes in the known universe. Just for once, why don’t we get some fun out of it?’
‘An’ no sarcastic rock and roll brat around, to make her deflating little remarks. Yeah, let’s go for it. Fuck, what is in this? It’s blowing my head off.’
‘That’s because you’ve hardly eaten a thing all day. I’ve been watching you. It’s only Bristol skunk, and you couldn’t leave the street lighting alone, could you? You cannot drain your cell metabolism like that, and then not eat—’
‘What would you know, fogey? I like draining my cell metabolism, it gives the world a nice edge, also like getting my head blown off—’
‘Sage, pull yourself together. Coolest dudes. Can you do it? No falling over things?’
‘Coolest dudes. I will not to fall over anything. But now I need a shit.’
‘Trust you. Well, you can’t do it here. You can’t shit on a public beach.’
‘Why not? This would be a Rivermead GM turd, with unzip bugs. Be gone in an hour. Okay, okay, if it worries you. Ax, how you got to be the leader of the outlaw unwashed I will never know. I’ll be dead suburban, I’ll go and shit in the water. I hope a terrible wave doesn’t come and drown me.’
‘Then I’d be sorry—’ Ax stopped laughing. He could see this wave. ‘Hey, be careful.’
‘Calm down, there is no terrible wave. Maybe you better come and hold my hand.’
The party was being thrown by Allie Marlowe, the Dictator’s Queenpin administrator; a Brighton native. There was quite a crowd: core members of the Rock and Roll Reich mingling graciously with South Coast Countercultural luminaries, favoured media-folk, non-Few rockstars; other useful people. Ax and Sage caused a satisfying stir. They presented themselves to their hostess (an ill woman to cross, Allie: better make sure and be polite), who congratulated them for turning up. They then forgot about being the coolest dudes and stood at the bar, forgetting to drink and ignoring everyone, talking about Fiorinda.
In Dissolution Summer she’d been the Indie babystar with a past: recruited off the streets by DARK, infamous Teesside dike-rockers: outed by the music press as the daughter of Rufus O’Niall, veteran Irish megastar. Ax had known the ugly story about Fiorinda and her father, and admired the kid’s courage: but he’d never been inspired to check out the music, until she was his girlfriend.
‘I knew what DARK were like, and I knew you’d taken her under your wing, which I’m afraid did not give me confidence. I had to get hold of No Reason and listen to it when she wasn’t around, to find out whether she was total crap—’
‘Hahaha. Then you got a surprise.’
‘Yeah.’ Ax shook his head fondly. ‘Blew me away. Fantastic. But you knew.’
No Reason, the debut album DARK had made w
ith Fiorinda, had transformed the band’s fortunes. Without her they’d been a disaster with flashes of genius. With her, they became extraordinary: though still fully as volatile.
‘I knew,’ agreed Sage, the skull grinning sweet and rueful. ‘Oh yes, I knew the first time I saw her on stage. Fourteen years old, screaming like a banshee, having severe difficulty singing and playing a guitar at the same time—’
Ax grinned. ‘Well, it’s a situation I try to avoid, myself.’
‘But she was the business—’
‘Dunno why I bothered, looking back. It was about a year before she condescended to turn up at a Chosen Few gig.’
The Chosen Few, now generally known as the Chosen, because the Few meant something else, was Ax’s band: comprising two of his brothers, and his ex-girlfriend Milly Kettle on drums. They didn’t play a big part in the Reich.
Fiorinda stories from long ago, some of them new to Ax even now. Her epic fights with Charm Dudley, DARK’s rabid-tempered front woman. Her cut-crystal management style with the government suits. Her secrets. (Have you ever caught her writing a song? Nah. Nor me. Always happens when I’m off the premises.) The shock of her intelligence. How much they missed the arrogant, oblivious, cruelly damaged teenager they had known. How much they loved the person she had become. The party chattered on. Across the room, above a frieze of heads, a big screen dsiplayed the Armada concert, finalé of the Boat People tour last summer. They watched Fiorinda and DARK, with Ax Preston as emergency stand-in guitarist: quite a change in demeanour for the Chosen’s sober, reserved virtuoso.
‘Did you plan to carry on like that?’ asked Sage, who’d been elsewhere that night.
‘No! I planned to blend in with the wallpaper, so that Charm would not hate me—’
‘Nyah. Not worth worrying about. Charm hates everyone, regardless.’
‘But with DARK, blending-in means—’
‘Go for it ’til you fall down bleeding at the nose and ears.’
‘Yeah. So it just happened.’
Their girl simply standing there, in the tight-waisted red and gold Elizabeth dress, red curls falling around her face. No can-can kicks, no cartwheels. This they didn’t like so much, as they knew what a feat of alcohol and raw courage was keeping her upright. But how the cameras loved her—
The scene changed, Fiorinda no more in sight, and they turned away at once.
‘You know,’ remarked Sage, ‘I really don’t like Charm Dudley, but it must have been a hell of a thing. I kept thinking, back then, Fiorinda forever, but I’m fucking glad that firestorm of a superstar brat didn’t happen to my band.’
They laughed, and talked of other things, only for the pleasure of coming back to her. Nice little country we’ve got hold of here, a little battered but still afloat. What are we going to do with it? Leave governing to the government, our job is the hearts and minds… The next big problem, as Ax saw it, was the Ancient British tendency, except they didn’t call themselves that now. Called themselves the Celtics, in alignment with a Pan-European movement of the same name. Anti-science, ultra-Green, covertly racist and dangerously attractive. The Celtics didn’t want economic recovery for the masses, mediated by futuristic-utopian sustainable tech: as all that sort of thing was against the will of Gaia—
It was a hijack. You didn’t hear Ireland, Scotland and Wales calling themselves the ‘Celtic nations’ any more. They didn’t wish to be associated. But needless to say, the sinister romantics had their fans at Westminster, and Ax’s own so-called subjects were deeply divided. So how to combat the Neo-Feudalist creep? Without starting a civil war in the Counterculture?
Ax had come up with the idea of an education scheme. Futuristic-Utopian arts and crafts. Masterclasses; training in music tech from superstars. Pop-cultural history in hedgeschool kindergartens. Bring in the rest of the Arts. Outreach to the general public, get some irresistible albums out. Rock and Roll meant something different now, for everyone trapped in Gulag Europe by the data quarantine. Not crowd control (disguised as the hedonistic soundtrack of the revolution), but a connection with the lost world. Psychological landscape, belief in the return of modern civilisation—
‘D’you think an education scheme is going to work?’
‘Truthfully, no,’ said Ax. ‘I always think my ideas for social engineering are ridiculously stupid and childish. But then I look at real government initiatives, supposedly designed by the grown-ups, you know? And fuck, I’m no worse.’
Sage laughed. ‘Well, okay, I’m in. You got us this far.’
‘I wish you’d sing more,’ sighed Ax. ‘You have such a great voice. There are songs I’d love to hear you do, and so would the punters. But no, you prefer to hide behind those fucking circus stunts that scare me to death, and I’m sure you’re going to kill yourself—’
‘I am not going to kill myself. Look, if I sing, I have to take care of the voice, they don’t take care of themselves, an’ the body (yeah, laugh, my stock-in-trade) is already a time-consuming hobby. Why don’t you sing more?’
‘Because I can’t.’
‘Now that is nonsense—’
The pauses became longer. Sentences fell into pools of engrossing silence. They left the spot where they’d taken root, went out on deck and stood leaning against the rail, backs to the water, elbows touching, breathing slow, sinking deeper and deeper into the feeling—
‘Sage?’
‘Ax.’
‘Let’s go home.’
Fiorinda had had the flu for Christmas, gone back to work too soon and succumbed to an attack of bronchitis. The after-effects were enough to keep her at home on a chilly, damp February night. Well, she wouldn’t have known where to put herself at Allie’s gig, in the circumstances.
So this is what happens. You are poorly, so your boyfriend abandons you to spend the day with his best mate, and they’re going to your best girlfriend’s party out of their heads on hideous mind-destroying drugs—
She’d meant to go to bed early. At midnight she was sitting up reading, drinking red wine and trying not to worry. When friends take oxytocin, the intimacy drug, things have been known to go horribly wrong. Especially when the friends are the same sex, and heterosexual (or more or less heterosexual, darling Ax…) Fiorinda hated modern drugs anyway. Taking massive doses of enhanced human biochemicals for fun sounded to her like—feeding cows on dead cows. You don’t need the scientific details, if you have any sense you just know it’s a terrible idea.
They’ll be okay. Sage will be in charge, because it is drugs. Or Ax will be in charge, because Sage loves that. Anyway one of them will be in charge. They always do that, very clever; or maybe it’s genetic, a male thing, to avoid—
The entryphone chimed: she had to go down and let them in.
‘Sorry,’ said Ax, on the doorstep, ‘couldn’t find my key.’
‘You don’t have a key, idiot. You look at the ID thing with your eyes. What are you doing back here, futile creatures? You can’t have a pair bond with three in it.’
‘We’re not interested in any other kind,’ Sage kissed the tip of her nose.
‘DON’T kiss my nose! I HATE it when you do that!’
But he had followed Ax upstairs, laughing.
In the big living-room they were walking around, beaming weirdly. Ax had taken off his coat and Sage his outer scummy sweater. Fiorinda returned to her book. She’d been asleep when Ax left for Reading (pretending to be asleep, to signal her disapproval). ‘Is that what you were wearing at Allie’s party? She will have been impressed.’ There was nothing wrong with Ax’s dark red suit except that it was a little shabby, which should be a virtue these days. Sage wore his beloved slick, Imipolex, one-shouldered black dungarees (easy for hosing down), over a dreadful Hard Fun Tour hoodie, itinerary dates illegible with age. It might once have been grey. Or maybe mud-brown.
‘Uh, yeah?’
‘Are we not modish enough? Maybe that’s what was up with her.’
‘She didn’t say anything
—’
‘I don’t remember whether she said anything. But I received tetchy vibes.’
‘Oh, surely not,’ said Fiorinda. ‘She wouldn’t have wasted her fire.’
Fiorinda was occupying one couch, along with Ax’s cat, who was fast asleep on a cushion. They took the other: Sage stretched out, Ax propped against it on the hearth rug, in front of the old flame-effect gas stove. ‘Is this room warm enough?’ asked Sage. ‘Can we turn that up? You have to keep warm, Fee.’
‘I am very cosy. Leave the stove alone, both of you. The state you are in, you’ll set the place on fire. Is it turning out the way you expected?’
Sage looks at Ax, Ax looks at Sage. They have a little staring match: breathing in synchrony. She’s not going to get an answer. They’ve forgotten the question, or neither of them is going to be the first to back down and say yes; or no.
‘What’s it feel like,’ she asked (her attitude softened by the fact that nothing seemed to have gone horribly wrong), ‘doing oxytocin?’
‘Depends who you are and who you’re taking it with,’ said Sage, disengaging from the stare to grin at the ceiling: a skull in a soppy dream. ‘If you’re me, and taking it with Ax, it feels not unlike being three years old and spending a happy day pottering around, doing nothing much, with your mother.’
‘I’d go with that,’ said Ax, smiling at his huge infant. ‘Only different.’
‘I may throw up.’ She wondered about Allie’s party. ‘Could you behave normally if you wanted to?’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Ax. ‘It’s very mild, really.’
‘Are we not behaving normally?’ asked Sage. They started laughing like fools: then stopped, gazing at each other with such grave happiness—
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